Perceptions by Gerry Warner

So you don’t believe in global warming? Well, take a look at the picture below of one effect of the greatest drought in California’s history. California is the USA’s most populous state (37 million), teetering on the edge of bankruptcy and Governor Jerry Brown is currently trying to float a $7.5 billion bond to provide financial relief for the drought-stricken state.

How bad is it in California? Well, let me tell you.

Some 25 per cent of the state’s $5 billion rice crop has been written off this year and rice farmers and other farmers in the state are so desperate they’re selling off their water rights instead of planting crops. State agri-producers estimate their losses in the billions this year and thousands of agricultural workers have lost their jobs.

Rivers in northern California are drying up, forcing the California Fish and Wildlife Agency to vacuum up the salmon from the streams and ship them in special tanker trucks to the ocean.

“This is a Herculean effort, but if we don’t do this there won’t be a fishing industry left,” an agency spokesman told NBC News. Salmon hatcheries are also being forced to buy water from municipal suppliers to keep their hatcheries in operation.

In nearby New Mexico, “Yoda” an ancient Douglas Fir tree growing in a lava field was recently declared dead despite having survived several previous droughts in its 700-year lifetime. Meanwhile, back in California, suburbanites are using a new high tech product to paint their parched lawns green in order to keep up appearances while Oprah Winfrey and her well-heeled neighbors in tony Montecito are paying $12,000- a-month to have extra water hauled to their estates.

Just how ridiculous it is was demonstrated recently in the California town of Los Gatos where a nudist camp was accused of installing an underground line to steal water from its neighbors, according to the San Jose Mercury News. But this isn’t as ridiculous as it sounds when it’s considered that 15 of California’s water districts have only a 60-day supply left.

So what happens if the five-year-old California drought continues much longer? Expect to be paying more for vegetables, fruit, milk, meat and beer because they’re all produced in industrial quantities in the Golden State. And when you consider the drought in Brazil, you’ll also be paying more for coffee too.

In its latest report, the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said the global warming we’re experiencing now is 95 per cent man-made resulting from the greenhouse gasses we’re spewing into the atmosphere.  In the forward to its Fifth Assessment Report, the IPCC says:

“. . . warming in the climate system is unequivocal with many of the observed changes unprecedented over decades to millennia: warming of the atmosphere, and the ocean, diminishing snow and ice, rising sea levels and increasing concentrations of greenhouse gasses. Each of the last three decades has been successively warmer at the Earth’s surface than any preceding decade since 1850.”

That’s pretty sobering language. Regardless of your political, religious or philosophical beliefs, it’s pretty hard to argue with scientific evidence from the best scientists on Earth. The question now is what are we going to do about it as individuals and citizens of what hopefully won’t be the Late Great Planet Earth?

Whatever you decide, I respectfully suggest you start doing it now. This affects all of us.

Photos from

– Gerry Warner is a retired journalist and a Cranbrook City Councillor. His opinions are his own.

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